Japanese students experience a day at Woodside High School

Students visited from Neyagawa, Japan, through Newport News' "Sister Cities" exchange program and traveled to surrounding areas such as Williamsburg and D.C. while staying with families of Woodside High School students.

.@NNPSWoodside hosted @sistercities_nn's group of Japanese delegates on Tuesday

Japanese comics, it turns out, can serve as a universal language to bring together people from opposite ends of the world.

That was just one lesson learned by a delegation of 15- to 21-year-old students from Neyagawa, Japan, as they spent Tuesday at Woodside High School.

The group, led by members of Woodside's Japanese Club, toured the campus and visited classes to learn how American school differs from theirs at home.

When the students went to the school library, a display of Japanese books, called manga, drew their attention. The genre is the most popular among Woodside students, and the librarians just happened to have them prominently on display.

The group of Japanese, 21 people in total, visited Newport News for a week as part of the city's Sister Cities program. Neyagawa has been Newport News' "sister" since 1982; a group from Newport News will travel to Japan in November.

The delegation also spent time at Hilton Elementary School and Christopher Newport University. Delegation leader Yusuke Torii said the group was very impressed by the elementary students' behavior and enjoyed CNU's campus.

"Students are so energetic and they're friendly," Torii said. "They say hi to us, and I'm really happy. ... We are so impressed."

The Japanese gave presentations to a class of Woodside students. Some spoke about the popularity of baseball, while others presented what a typical day is like for a high school-aged Japanese student.

Some students from Newport News were shocked to learn that Japanese students clean their schools, not as punishment but as part of their regular day. And female students have restrictions on what they can and can't wear in the classroom, which surprised Woodside senior Saimon Stanley.

"I learned a lot of new things about their culture," Stanley, 19, said. "I didn't know that girls can't wear makeup in school — that's crazy. What if our girls didn't wear makeup, how would it be?"

Woodside's Japanese Club has about 50 members, and three of them helped guide the group around the school. Members take time to learn about more than anime or sushi, but having first-hand experience with visitors gave better context to what they take time to learn about.

"We only know what we see on the computer or in a video, so actually getting to be introduced to people from Japan is pretty inspiring to us," said Haley Wheeler, 18.

John Boyles, administrator for Woodside's arts and communications magnet program, said he hoped that message was relayed to all the students who spent time with the visiting delegation.

Students visited from Neyagawa, Japan, through Newport News' "Sister Cities" exchange program and traveled to surrounding areas such as Williamsburg and D.C. while staying with families of Woodside High School students.

(Aileen Devlin/Daily Press)

"It sort of opens a page to a big world out there, because our students are, as students often are, very focused on themselves," Boyles said. "So to try to get them to open up to what else is happening in the world and what other cultures are like is really important. It'll be really significant for our kids, because I think they need the experience of, 'So, what's life like in the rest of the world?'"